


Seriphim

by Tysis



Series: Disaster Shorts For FF [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy
Genre: Cloud Strife Needs a Hug, Cloud Strife is Cloud Stife, Dimension Travel, Gen, Mortal Coils are For Losers, Time Travel, Timeline Merging?, Two Or More Versions Of Cloud Get Squished into One Cloud, Wings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24095374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tysis/pseuds/Tysis
Summary: Cloud Strife vanishes one day, leaves ShinRa, leaves Midgar.Zack has spent five years looking for him.
Series: Disaster Shorts For FF [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738432
Comments: 10
Kudos: 92





	1. Six

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Author has never played a FF game in their entire life. All Knowledge comes from a game movie of the remake and fanfiction.
> 
> So if a Chara is terrifyingly OOC, please let me know.

The glass is cracking.

Hojo hasn’t noticed yet, still bragging, still showing off and Zack is careful to keep his attention.

Careful to keep him focused anywhere but the enormous glass fishbowl of an experiment tank. Filled to the brim with Mako, capped off with steel and bolt.

Sephiroth shifts beside him, tense.

“And so,” Hojo says, manic delight in every horrible wrinkle, “I no longer have any use for you. I will have a new generation of SOLDIERS! I will bring about-”

Zack tunes him out again, lets automatic reactions take over because something in the vast sea of Mako is waking up. He can feel it, like crawling legs up his spine, like eyes from the shadows.

Like… 

A WEAPON?

The level taps against the glass, floating meters below the surface. A meter below the surface.

Above the surface now, and it’s with dawning horror that Zack finally realizes that the Mako is  _ draining _ , being pulled, condensed towards the center of the enclosure.

Something is absorbing it.

Sephiroth is yelling now, years of frustration and a lifetime’s worth of anger finally being excised and Zack can’t find anything within himself to pay attention. Good on him though.

One hand goes to his Buster. Zack slides back, eyes fixed.

Only a few moments, he estimates, until- 

Until whatever, whoever it is wakes up. And he wouldn’t bet a single Gil on it being in a good mood.

The conversation is petering off, and he tenses, scrambles, digging through everything he knows of the professor for something, anything to keep him distracted a little longer. Long enough for it to wake up.

Long enough for him and Sephiroth to get the hell out here.

The lab, buried deep under the old ShinRa Mansion, abandoned for years according to locals. Abandoned, and left to rust until Hojo came.

Came  _ back _ , that is.

“Where did you find it?” he askes, half curious despite himself. “The-” it? Experiment? “Subject C.”

Hojo stops mid monologue, surprised.

“The mountains, if you must know. Encased in crystalline Mako, deep in one of the old natural pools. It has ten, no, a hundred times the potential of the J cells.”

An awful sneer crosses his face.

“Soon even you will be obsolete, my boy,” Hojo laughs, laughs and-

Time runs out.

The thing in the tank  _ explodes _ , glass breaking, glass splitting and falling and.

Metal braces buckle.

Metal  _ screams _ , twists and breaks under the force of  _ Wings _ . Six in total, massive amalgams of white edged in green crystal, absolutely wrecking the laboratory, shredding the stations and catwalks.

Hojo screams.

Falls.

Not a drop of Mako or blood hits the floor.

The wings take up the whole room, tangible, yet insubstantial. Zack’s fingers pass right through them, the feathers as long as his arm. It felt like sticking his hand in a wall socket, and they curl, confined by what is left of the walls

And the center of it all, a horribly familiar shock of blond.

-

Zack meets him for the first time in the cadet mess hall, a shortie with a bad attitude and hair like a chocobo’s butt. Accent thick as his skull, all spikes and prickles to boot.

Cloud Strife is an enigma that needs a good hug or five because damn is the little guy touch starved or what, and Zack makes a promise to himself on that first day.

He shadows Spikey, keeps an eye on him because country boys gotta stick together. Drops in on him from time to time, keeps himself from falling off the map for too long.

It’s good for both of them.

Until one day, Cloud Strife fails his Soldier exam.

Zack is told he left.

Zack is told he quit, in all but name. Took leave, went back to his home town.

Never came back.

Listed as a deserter

Zack Fair spends the next five years looking for him, in all the crevasses of the world he can reach.

Zack Fair wanders into Nibelheim during year six, on a patrol with Sephiroth to check up on the reactor. Its nothing that should be his job, nothing that should have been assigned to Firsts of all SOLDIERS but they go, and Zack goes gladly to the first place he looked.

Hoping to find something, anything.

He misses his spikey lil’chocobro.

-

Cloud doesn’t remember. The feel of wind on his face, the smell of the mountains. The warmth of a hand, an arm over his shoulder.

They have passed, burned away in unending green fire, scorching, gnawing, biting.

Burned away, burned away.

And he’s so  _ cold _ , like buried, like lost, like _ dying _ .

And the screaming.

He remembers things that haven’t happened.

Lives he’s never lived.

His life, one so far removed from what little he can recall.

Two lives, two dead in one living chest, for some Helforsaken reason.

He goes back home in each one, sees Mother, Tifa.

Goes back for different reasons, once on a mission, once out of hope.

Nibelheim burns.

Cloud falls, deep into the earth and the ground. Burning green, burning away at his mind, and some part of him has always been there, their’s, the Planet reaches up and around.

And some part of him, has lived so long beneath the crust, so long in the depths of The Lifestream.

Cloud crystalizes, held in one moment in time and for the first breath he can remember, he is whole, full of  _ himself, _ and only that.

He is collected, held.

Time passes.

Time drags, and Cloud has waited eons or years. Or no time at all.

He can’t feel, he can’t  _ hear _ per se. Can’t see, blind and unborn into this time.

Nevertheless, he  _ knows _ . The echoes of movement beyond his cradle. The reverberations, the beats of a heart, two hearts he knows so well.

He is a chrysalis, waiting to hatch.

This time, this turn, it is his choice.

So sayth Gaea.

And it’s clear, like nothing else has been. Here, back before the fall, before Sephiroth goes off the deep end, before the meteor, before Geostigma, before Aerith dies, before  _ Zack, _ oh  _ Hel, before Zack, before Hojo. _

Before it all went worse, even if it was all wrong from the start.

Before before before.

And this time,  _ Hojo dies first. _

-


	2. five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this makes no goddamn sense  
> Cloud is Eldritch.

Sephiroth has lived too long as a medical and scientific wonder to feel any kind of faith. To be able to trust anything like fate.

Believe in it, maybe. Dread it. Fear it.

But trust? He has seen far too much for that.

He’s seen the underbelly of Midgar, the worst of the slum and the worst of the people. The gang leaders, the pimps, the rapists, the murderers.

The broken, the hungry.

The empty, the tortured, the experiment beds that seemed to stretch on forever in the bowls of Professor Hojo’s laboratory, the monsters locked in electric cages, and each day he would dread, think, wonder.

Would he be the next failure.

So he would run, some days when the eyes on him were few. Run out, under the plate as far away from ShinRa as he could get.

And there he would see more of the same. The same wretched living.

So he’s seen the bad and the evil.

He’s seen the do-gooders too.

Seen them dead in the streets with a knife in their ribs, robbed blind and bleeding.

When he was young, he thought that was the exception.

Later, under scapel and laser and burning Mako, he learns that is the rule.

But seeing Professor Hojo’s bent and mangled form, seeing the aberrant man, child,  _ boy _ standing over him, Sephiroth thinks he might just understand how Underplaters can believe in angels.

Out of curiosity, numb and shaking, he sticks an arm through one of the massive wings.

It crawls over his fingers like heavy mist, like a friendly cloud of electrons. Tickles the underside of his palm like the brush of feathers it should be. An electric feather duster.

“Cloud!” Zack shouts, startling him. Sephiroth looks, really  _ looks _ . Spikes, blond hair. Piercing blue eyes and the curve of a jaw can just be made out.

They unfold, stretch in ways no human should be able to. Limbs too long, eyes too bright.

A flicker, and they echo themselves, two, three figures overlapping on a background of white.

He doesn’t stop Zack Fair.

Doesn’t hold him back and they collide, SOLDIER and angel. 

Cloud,  _ Specimen C _ , unwraps arms too long, and buries himself in Zacks embrace.

Sephiroth stands as an outsider, witness.

There is something distinctly wrong and yet so right. 

Like a weighted blanket draped around his soul while what is left of the walls reverberate with just how-

How to describe.

It is,  _ he  _ is. Cloud Strife, trooper feels like someone has taken reality by the neck and  _ snapped it  _ 360 degrees. 

Looks the same.

But fundamentally, inescapably  _ wrong. _

Like a badly edited photo, an incorrect cartridge, a broken hinge. 

A poorly repaired paint job, and Sephiroth stands, shaking because  _ Hojo was his father, his creator.  _

_ A liar. _

Because his entire life has just unraveled before his eyes and there is an angel, glowing with-

There is an arm, and it doesn’t feel right, wrapped around his shoulders.

He doesn’t cry.

A dip of his head, a solid shoulder under it is all he will allow himself. He is Sephiroth, the Demon of Wutai, the Silver General-

He is lost, in all the right ways and it fits, fits in all the new hollows of his heart, each wrong like warmth and healing. 

Like he was, is, like he is now, wrong in all the right places. 

Because even he, Sephiroth, could not be more monstrous than this.

-

Hojo’s death is anticlimactic in its finality.

The body, absent of soul, of that spark of life, crumples to the ground.

Cloud doesn’t care, beyond watching the final light go out in his eyes. 

  
Step one accomplished.

Step two pending.

And then there is a shout, and then movement in the corner of his eyes and then-

_ Zack _ . Well, whole, alive.

Incandescent, burning with lifeforce, burning like the  _ sun _ , and Cloud doesn’t know if he  _ can _ cry, anymore, at all after the Planet shoved too much of him into too little space. But he damn well makes the attempt.

He focuses on moving. Each step, each muscle an exercise in restraint because right now, if he isn’t careful, there won’t be a body left to hug Zack. If he moves too fast, burns too bright. Stepping out of this layer would be, is so easy.

And while he can feel, the air, the world turning beneath his feet, Cloud wants to touch. Wants to prove that he is here, that Zack is here.

Even Sephiroth, pre madness, pre Jenova. 

Zack, Cloud discovers, is warm. Just on the edge of too much, just enough. 

Enough to sear away the last chill, the last lingering cold right down to his bones.

For the briefest of moments, Cloud allows himself this.

Allows the world to seep away until all that exists is warm, is a pair of arms around him.

Lingers.

But they are not the only ones here, and Sephiroth needs this just as much. Needs something, anything to latch on to and at one point, that would have scared Cloud out of his damn mind.

The very idea of it, make him want to run, to hide, to fight, to  _ bleed _ and yet now, with so much in so strong a body, here in this place, this time it actually manages to be a comfort. Something in Sephiroth wants to stay sane. Something, anything, is not on board with going headlong off the cliff shouting hail marys.

Something, doesn’t want to die. Or kill everyone in the world

And that is very, very good.

Excellent, in fact.

So, he decides, still floating, still only warmth and arms, Sephiroth deserves a reward.

…

A hug is a good reward, yes?

A Zack hug is even better, but Sephiroth will have to work his way up to that.

Later.

So he splits, warps. Stretches even, and Cloud has no damn idea how it works but in the end he’s got both Zack  _ and _ Sephiroth wrapped up in mostly real wings and arms that really aren’t doing what they should be so, alls well that ends well.

This new… wrongness is going to take a while getting used to but Cloud is already seeing the benefits.

Wing therapy! No need to bash anyone over the head, hugs are the new Cloud.

But that is that, and this is this, and, as the hug ends as all hugs do, Cloud is a little saddened by the loss of feeling.

He gets the feeling the Planet is smug about something.

Can’t imagine what.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter 2 of either 6 or 3
> 
> ill let you know when I figure it out

**Author's Note:**

> Are you confused? Lost? Frightened?
> 
> Well so was I.
> 
> You're in good company.
> 
> Putting chapter count at a tentative 3, but might not happen.


End file.
